Starter.xyz – Namecheap customer – (Iceland)
The .xyz community is growing with decentralized finance solutions, cryptocurrency tools, and investment platforms, as blockchain innovations continue developing worldwide. Crypto wallet Monolith.xyz aims to make it easier for users to buy, store, and spend their cryptocurrency in the real world. NFT-focused FlamingoDAO.xyz created a platform for investing in blockchain-based assets. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to a community-driven launchpad aimed to connect investors with inventors of projects based on a choice of seven different blockchains: Starter.xyz.
Starter.xyz is a community-oriented decentralized launchpad for innovative blockchain-based projects. The Starter.xyz platform is unique for its multi-chain ecosystem, which means the platform supports project launches on seven different blockchains (Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, Polygon, Fantom, and, most recently, Avalanche). Members can connect their wallet from either of those blockchains for purchasing and storing the platform’s native $START token.
The $START token functions as a means of exchange, store of value, and a unit of measurement inside the Starter.xyz ecosystem. The total supply of $START is 1,000,000 tokens. Out of this total supply, 850,139 tokens are already in circulation. The current market price of $START (as of September 1, 2021) is $6.91. The $START token also provides the power to vote for projects to be launched on the platform.
Starter.xyz uniquely provides projects access to funding opportunities without common obstacles such as complex Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. (KYC requirements help financial institutions to “know their customer,” stay compliant, and add value to the banking experience for their customers.) Starter.xyz allows developers to submit their projects directly to the platform’s community for review. After review, the community will come together to vote and decide on which projects will be listed. Every community member is required to perform their own due diligence and research before voting for projects to be listed. Every project receives an equal chance to access investment funding, and investors can quickly identify and invest in legitimate projects that meet their requirements.
Successful project launches include crypto lending platform Yamp Finance, gaming-focused social platform Wasder, and investment platform Wall Street Bets. The platform is launching projects that combine two popular utilities of 2021: decentralized finance (DeFi) and iGaming. This combination has resulted in a new term known as Gamified Finance, or GameFi. In September, Starter.xyz announced that Starchi, their first DeFi game, inspired by nostalgia for the original Tamagotchi, was awarded a grant from the Polygon Foundation. Within the game, players are tasked with acquiring and nurturing adoptable digital pets called Starchis from infancy to adulthood. Players are responsible for preventing further extinction of Starchi through friendly battles that allow them to socialize their digital pets and earn wages to become top collectors in the Starchi village. At the end of August, the community voted to list a first of its kind project called BUSTA. BUSTA is the first GameFi project built on the Binance Smart Chain. This jackpot game will also feature a trading and betting module as well as their own Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which will allow the BUSTA community to control most of the ecosystem.
Starter.xyz is a welcome addition to the .xyz community of blockchain innovators and forward-thinkers. We are inspired by their claim to have raised over $20M USD for more than 30 blockchain-based projects, and we are eager to see the projects that come to life. You can learn more by following them on Twitter @Starterxyz, LinkedIn, or by visiting Starter.xyz.
SuperstarX.xyz – Webnames.ca customer – (Canada)
Your website is a place of creative opportunity. It’s an online destination where you can share your philosophies and proudly express yourself and your unique background. Whether you want to showcase your professional resume, your photography, or the varied multimedia projects of your own mission-driven organization, you can use your website to share all of that and more. Tech designer BrianTan.xyz shares his design projects along with information about the Philippines chapter of Effective Altruism that he developed. Prior Amazon leader and PhD in Digital Economy Juan José Delgado uses JJDelgado.xyz to showcase his skills in marketing strategy. Versatile creative Leighton Gray uses LeightonGray.xyz to highlight her variety of gaming, illustration, and podcast projects. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to a collective that believes everyone deserves to be celebrated: SuperstarX.xyz.
SuperstarX.xyz is a multimedia collective aimed at destigmatizing and celebrating our differences, with a goal of connection and eradicating oppression. They aim to support their goals through the production of art, film, music, and fashion. SuperstarX.xyz shares the work of their collective through the following channels:
SuperstarX.xyz donates 10% of proceeds from these channels towards wellness initiatives, programs, and organizations. The most recent issue of SXM was released in August 2021 and 10% of all proceeds will be donated to On Canada Project, an organization that aims to mobilize millennials and members of Generation Z to create change.
Nicole M. Weatherly founded SuperstarX.xyz in 2017 after drawing inspiration from her younger brother, Edward. According to The X Story page, in 1999, at the age of 23, Edward was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nicole took inspiration from Edward’s health journey and his development of unique artwork. She also looked to her own experience of “different” after coming out as a lesbian. She formed the collective to celebrate being human and destigmatizing being so called “different,” through the co-creation of art, film, music, and fashion in support of multidimensional wellness. Multidimensional wellness integrates numerous interrelated domains (physical, social, emotional, spiritual, occupational) holistically.
Throughout the website, SuperstarX.xyz uses terms like “multidimxnsional” and “humxn,” which have a purposeful spelling with the letter “X.” As shared on their Story page, after Edward was hospitalized he began drawing colourful aliens, such as his first drawing, entitled “X.” Nicole is supportive of Edward’s art, considering it a “special medium to share with the world to help inspire greater awareness, understanding, and acceptance of ‘different,’ celebrating all of what makes us ‘humxn.’”
This celebration of uniqueness and authenticity is reflected in SuperstarX.xyz’s selection of artists for the collective, known as X Artists. The website explains that “X Artists are socially vulnerable and/or those who are (or have been) racialized, stigmatized, ostracized, marginalized, bullied, and/or excluded for being “different.” After an artist joins the collective, the X Team begins a collaboration process to co-create a mutually beneficial and sustainable path forward, including multimedia artwork through the Superstar X Magazine or shoppable products for The X Shop.
We are proud to have forward-thinkers dedicated to wellness and acceptance like SuperstarX.xyz helping to define the .xyz community. Just as .xyz is reshaping the future of the internet, Nicole and SuperstarX.xyz are working to reshape how we honor each other’s unique differences. SuperstarX.xyz is a great example of how you can share your own important mission with your .xyz website. You can learn more by following on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or by visiting SuperstarX.xyz.
Serwah.xyz – Network Solutions customer – (Australia)
The .xyz community is home to many visual creatives and digital artists using .xyz to further their career and showcase their work. Visual effects specialist ChristopherKerr.xyz showcases his professional film and television experience. Vienna-based artist and researcher AleydaRocha.xyz displays engaging and interactive art that accompanies her scientific research projects. Experienced filmmaker SarahKuck.xyz shares multimedia content from her extensive career in a well-organized digital portfolio. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to an accomplished creative who displays her oil paintings and 3D digital art on a personal website with a memorable “first name” .xyz domain: Serwah.xyz.
Serwah.xyz is the online portfolio of West Sydney, Australia-based digital artist Serwah Attafuah. Serwah is an oil painter and self taught digital artist. Her surreal cyber dreamscapes and other beautiful visuals are capturing the attention of the digital art world. A 2021 article in The Fashion Law titled “Non-Fungible Tokens Are Here to Stay: How Can Technology Law Harness Them?” references Serwah as one of the first Australian artists to sell an NFT (a piece titled “Voidwalker”). The article discusses how the NFT is programmed so that Serwah will automatically get 10% of the sale price any time the artwork is re-sold.
In a video shared by Sotheby’s, Serwah discusses her background as a digital artist and musician based in Australia. In 2013, after predominantly creating with oil paints, she started working in 3D art. She began creating surreal cyber dreamscapes that illustrate the contrast between the digital and physical worlds. Creation of My Metaverse (Between this World and the Next), her piece for the Sotheby’s collection, contains imagery of a fallen ancient world, grounded planets, and carved stone pillars, all juxtaposed with two figures in the pose from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. As she explains in the video, someone had expressed to her that she is presenting her own definitive metaverse. A friend indicated that she presents herself as a God of that metaverse, where she makes up the rules.
Serwah’s rise to success could be traced to her early NFT sales on Foundation, a popular platform that hosts live auctions for NFTs. In March 2021, she was commissioned by Nike and JD Sports Australia to create assets for the Air Max Day 2021 hub, but she first found herself at the center of the global NFT conversation due to her sales of “Voidwalker” and “Consensual Hallucinations” on Foundation. “Consensual Hallucinations” sold for 10 ETH (approximately $27k at the time), which is quite significant for one of an artist’s first sales. This led to her being selected to be part of Sotheby’s curated NFT collection, Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale. One month later, in time for Pride Month, she collaborated on an animated audio NFT with Charli XCX. The NFT was featured as part of a collection on Nifty Gateway, a popular NFT platform. Proceeds from the collection were donated to benefit Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). After that, she had three pieces of art featured in a GQ article titled “How to Design a Better Body.”
On her Paintings page, you can see how Serwah’s interests and themes began in one medium and carried over to her digital creations. “Civic Park” 2015 is an oil painting described as an homage to Jesse Edwards (an American artist known primarily for his still life oil paintings). A lighter, a Smurf figurine, a can of spray paint, and a Mountain Dew bottle accompany a singular Nike sneaker in the modern day still life painting. This earlier piece somewhat foreshadows her future collaborative work with Nike. In “Decay” 2015, which Serwah created with acrylic, enamel and oil paints on canvas board, you can see her interest in creating mind-bending visuals, later seen in her work “Consensual Hallucinations 2020,” also displayed on her homepage, in which an ornately adorned, golden female is surrounded by tropical fish.
The Serwah.xyz domain is branded with Serwah’s unique, short, and memorable first name. On Serwah’s Contact page, she provides her email address for commissions, collaborations and inquiries. There is great benefit to a branded email address like [email protected]. A lot of her work-related communication will likely be conducted over email, so it’s a great idea to use a custom email address that can generate trust. An email address that ends in the same domain as your website can appear more professional by verifying that the owner of the website and the owner of the email are the same person. Using your domain name to create custom, branded email addresses connects all of your company representatives and public contact emails with your website. By using [email protected], contacts can feel confident that they are emailing with the owner of the website, Serwah.
We are excited to have Serwah.xyz and her empowering images of afro-futurist identity in the .xyz community of visual artists and innovative creatives. You can see more of Serwah’s work by following her on Instagram and Twitter, or by visiting Serwah.xyz.
CTA: Explore the digital metaverse brought to life by Serwah.xyz
Universe.xyz – GoDaddy customer – (United States)
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are one-of-a-kind digital collectibles that can become valuable investments. More and more forward thinking creatives are populating the .xyz community and harnessing the power of blockchain technology to create, distribute, and invest in NFTs. Decentralized Autonomous Organization project FlamingoDAO.xyz created a platform for members to pool funds for NFT investments. Publishing platform Mirror.xyz helps writers distribute and monetize their minted work. Crypto art curator FirstEdition.xyz created a blockchain art gallery. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to an all-encompassing NFT platform designed to empower artists to mint and sell their digital assets: Universe.xyz.
Universe.xyz is an NFT-based platform built on Ethereum blockchain technology. It is composed of digital solutions aimed to help artists easily create and monetize NFTs. Universe.xyz provides creatives with the tools they may need to transform items like paintings, songs, pictures, videos, and GIFs into NFTs, as well as the necessary means to sell them via auction. In May, they announced that their seed round raised over $4.3M to build a “Non-fungible universe.” This universe is governed by the xyzDAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which is like a corporation (set up on the blockchain), except no single person or group has control. The xyzDAO empowers the community by enabling decentralized decision-making regarding parameters of Universe.xyz, such as fees and future upgrades.
The Universe Protocol has two major functions. The first is a method for creating and minting new NFTs, known as Collections. Minting is the process of turning something, such as digital art, into a part of the Ethereum blockchain as a public ledger. The second function is a method for auctioning off those Collections. Universe Minting is where you can create and edit NFTs, and run them through a review process before launching. You can create one NFT or a collection of as many NFTs as you like. You can edit, format or change the styles of your NFTs before uploading the media and filling out the metadata. Once you have completed these steps, you can mint your NFT immediately or save it for publishing later. Universe Auction, a decentralized auction house still in development, is how you will be able to monetize your NFTs. Once launched, you can create a multi-tier reward system where you can compile several NFTs into rewards. You can choose between Platinum and Gold Tiers, and customize your rewards precisely as you want. After designing the details of the reward packages, you can create a landing page for your auction with photos, logos, and sales copy.
Universe.xyz grants voting rights and the ability to buy and sell NFTs to holders of the Universe $XYZ token. $XYZ tokens are the native currency of Universe.xyz which allows users to buy and sell NFTs. It is an ERC-20 token that allows users to vote on DAO proposals and earn rewards through the staking platform. When Universe.xyz launched on June 6, 2021, one billion $XYZ tokens were released. More tokens will be minted each year to accommodate new users in the Universe.xyz ecosystem. The market price of $XYZ as of August 5, 2021 is $0.1099. The total number of tokens in circulation is 168,226,310, while its market capitalization is $19,737,308.
One of Universe.xyz’s co-founders, Tim Kang, began his career as a software engineer for Deutsche Bank and invested a year of savings in Ethereum in early 2016, before becoming an avid NFT collector. He also developed the Sevens Foundation, which hosts grant programs to help emerging artists with the challenges of getting into the NFT space, such as the rising costs of minting an NFT. He recently partnered with Paris Hilton on a grant called “Empowered By Paris: Empowered Women Empower Women Exhibition,” which called on female artists to create a piece that explores the themes of female empowerment and representation.
As blockchain technology and digital assets continue to increase in popularity, we are excited to see the .xyz community grow with artist-focused members like Tim Kang and Universe.xyz. Learn more by following the platform on Twitter @universe_xyz or by visiting Universe.xyz.
Unedited.xyz – GoDaddy customer – (United States)
The .xyz community is a proud home to many innovative and forward-thinking fashion designers and clothing brands. Berlin-based menswear brand Goetze.xyz was created by Sissi Goetze and is inspired by the city’s elements of art, design and leisure. Spain-based children’s clothing label Unsmile.xyz donates a portion of all proceeds to the CurArte Foundation to help hospitalized children and their families. Vaporwave streetwear brand PublicSpace.xyz sells high-quality, Los Angeles-made clothing with designs by fashion designer and founder Eric Wu. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday we’ll introduce you to a fashion brand that rotates their online collection of limited quantity pieces every three weeks to provide unique items inspired by exotic locales: Unedited.xyz.
Unedited.xyz is the online home of Unedited XYZ, a Miami-based clothing brand by co-founders Ines Sheero, a fashion creative, and Elio Rojas Riera, a Miami and Fort Lauderdale area realtor. The inspiration for their brand name can be gleaned from an Instagram caption which reads “Do not edit yourself. Be UN-EDITED.” The website features unique mens and womens clothing designed, created, and upcycled in limited quantities. The brand encourages frequent visits to Unedited.xyz because they rotate their limited quantity inventory every three weeks. Visitors must enter an email address to access the website, which helps the brand keep in touch with customers and alert them to important and exciting updates.
The clothing on Unedited.xyz is inspired by beautiful and exotic travel destinations. Current featured items designed for women include the Baru Robe, a linen robe with pink detailing and the eye-catching Unedited XYZ logo. A product description explains that the item was inspired by the Islas del Rosario off the coast of Colombia and was originally designed as a component for an outfit for Burning Man, a popular event held annually in the Black Rock Desert, north of Reno, Nevada, celebrating community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They also feature the Sorrento Windbreaker, described as divine and unique as the Coast of Sorrento in the south of Italy, overlooking Naples. On the For Him page, you can find the Kiva Jacket, a black denim jacket with the words “Protect Yo Energy” across the back. The product description explains that this jacket has a unisex classic fit and is strong and sleek like the rocky beaches of Lake Tahoe. If you see something you like, you’re encouraged to act fast. As production quantities are kept small, Unedited.xyz is able to regularly produce and feature new items to add to your wardrobe.
Unedited.xyz aims to inspire visitors to have fun while putting outfits together, and even more fun while wearing them. On the brand’s How to Wear page, a banner at the top states “Be happy, not perfect.”The page also explains “It’s all about feeling great with what you are wearing because this will bring confidence in you and that’s what we want.” This lookbook page includes a photographs taken by the brand, friends, and clients, and offers suggestions on how to wear Unedited.xyz’s featured products. Take a look at wildly popular Venezuelan telenovela actress Sabrina Seara for more inspiration. She turned heads at the 2021 Latin American Music Awards wearing the Caida del Cielo, a custom bright pink Unedited.xyz garment.
We are excited to have innovative fashion brands like Unedited.xyz populating the .xyz community, especially those that promote originality, confidence, and joy. Keep up with their ever-changing collection of fashions by following on Instagram @Unedited.xyz, Facebook @Unedited XYZ, or by visiting Unedited.xyz.
